I'd say the indie success of XL or Domino will be hard to replicate. It's just a different time. Dirty Hit might be one to add to the list, while only founded in 2009.
Yeah Dirty Hit would definitely be on there. I think the only reason I didn't mention them (again, full disclosure: they're an MU client!) is because they were partnered with Universal for a good while, which purists might argue means they're not a 'true' indie. Frankly though I think the term 'indie' is increasingly worthless these days because so many have some kind of dotted line to a major (e.g. PIAS being 49% owned by Universal - so does that mean anything they handle isn't indie? And so on...)
Yeah it's very unclear today what 'indie' means. Ingrooves, who is Dirty Hit's current distributor I believe, is owned by UMG as well. With The Orchard owned by Sony, those 'real' indies have become rare. (Shoutouts to Idol.)
Oh god yes when you get into distro there's barely any that are truly indie. Hence all the kerfuffle about RAYE winning her Brit award - some places were making much of her being on an indie label when in reality she still goes via The Orchard (I think) such that it still amounts to a win for Sony too. Messy, no question!
A record label, to a musician, has always meant two things:
1. Someone (with money) believes in what you're doing besides you; and
2.) A "tribal marker", denoting you as belonging to a genre/subculture/etc.
If you were on "Amphetamine Reptile" in the 90s, it meant something different from being on Matador, or 4AD, or Megaforce or Fat Possum. That mattered, bc the audience they were addressing was distinct, and would sample and (if agreeable) accept your band simply because of the label's "imprimatur".
The only label I can think of in the last 10-15 years to really get that right is Chicago's Sargent House.
Such an imprimatur was a great help to bands and discerning writers/radio show DJs (like on "college radio" here in US) and listeners, and now that that model has faded, we are all poorer for it.
It’s not a label I follow, and founded in 2007, but I guess Erased Tapes is worth a mention. On a much more low key level, though a label I do follow, there is Nonclassical.
Hi Dom - yeah I'd say Erased Tapes certainly warrant a mention. I hope they wouldn't take offence if I suggested they weren't as large as those I mentioned in terms of profit or turnover, but at the same time they are in their niche and doing a terrific job of maintaining that in arguably an even more unstable landscape than most of those bigger indies work in. I love them - long may they continue!!
How about The Leaf Label? They have a good blend of relatively well known and more obscure artists on their roster, I was going to say they are almost a mid career XL but just checked and they were founded in 1994.
Also, if your part of beggars banquet how independent are you? And what were the circumstances around them joining?
My first job in a&r (at Nonesuch, from 2008-2011) was special. I scouted artists based upon my ears. My job was to find something I had never heard before, decide if we could define an audience for it, and rely on a press ecosystem to let potential fans discover it. There were a few fleeting reasons why this approach could work: There wasn't as much music being put out then. It was conceivable I could listen to virtually everything in the western world and have a frame of reference of what I was hearing - then pick out what was truly special. There was also a vibrant press community with a proactively engaged audience. If something had a favorable review in a few key places, I knew it was worth X revenue for the label.
My second job in a&r (head of a&r for Sony Masterworks from 2017 -2023) was not great. It was a data analytics job. Using all the streaming & social data we could find, we would look for evidence a song or artist was garnering attention. In fact, I often knew quite a bit about an artist, and what a potential fan base looked like, before I heard a note. It was also impossible to understand where it fit into the cultural context with the sheer volume of music being released: In between these two a&r jobs I was director of artist partnerships & industry relations for Pandora. We had the history of western recorded music in our catalog - about 18M tracks by 2014. According to Audible Magic, that number is now 220M tracks. A growth of a factor of ten in ten years.
I spend a lot of time thinking about recreating my Nonesuch days, and if it's even possible. I really don't know. The correlation between musical/ songwriting talent and having a career, while already tenuous in my Nonesuch days, is gone. The skill set(s) a musician needs to reach an audience are increasingly non-creative. I don't think it's impossible for the next Radiohead to have a big career based on their musical quality, but I do think it might be impossible for a single label to have enough of these that it's a business.
I'd say the indie success of XL or Domino will be hard to replicate. It's just a different time. Dirty Hit might be one to add to the list, while only founded in 2009.
Yeah Dirty Hit would definitely be on there. I think the only reason I didn't mention them (again, full disclosure: they're an MU client!) is because they were partnered with Universal for a good while, which purists might argue means they're not a 'true' indie. Frankly though I think the term 'indie' is increasingly worthless these days because so many have some kind of dotted line to a major (e.g. PIAS being 49% owned by Universal - so does that mean anything they handle isn't indie? And so on...)
Yeah it's very unclear today what 'indie' means. Ingrooves, who is Dirty Hit's current distributor I believe, is owned by UMG as well. With The Orchard owned by Sony, those 'real' indies have become rare. (Shoutouts to Idol.)
Oh god yes when you get into distro there's barely any that are truly indie. Hence all the kerfuffle about RAYE winning her Brit award - some places were making much of her being on an indie label when in reality she still goes via The Orchard (I think) such that it still amounts to a win for Sony too. Messy, no question!
A record label, to a musician, has always meant two things:
1. Someone (with money) believes in what you're doing besides you; and
2.) A "tribal marker", denoting you as belonging to a genre/subculture/etc.
If you were on "Amphetamine Reptile" in the 90s, it meant something different from being on Matador, or 4AD, or Megaforce or Fat Possum. That mattered, bc the audience they were addressing was distinct, and would sample and (if agreeable) accept your band simply because of the label's "imprimatur".
The only label I can think of in the last 10-15 years to really get that right is Chicago's Sargent House.
Such an imprimatur was a great help to bands and discerning writers/radio show DJs (like on "college radio" here in US) and listeners, and now that that model has faded, we are all poorer for it.
Agree with all of that Shaggy! Thanks for your thoughts 🙏🏻
Nice article Darren.
It’s not a label I follow, and founded in 2007, but I guess Erased Tapes is worth a mention. On a much more low key level, though a label I do follow, there is Nonclassical.
Hi Dom - yeah I'd say Erased Tapes certainly warrant a mention. I hope they wouldn't take offence if I suggested they weren't as large as those I mentioned in terms of profit or turnover, but at the same time they are in their niche and doing a terrific job of maintaining that in arguably an even more unstable landscape than most of those bigger indies work in. I love them - long may they continue!!
How about The Leaf Label? They have a good blend of relatively well known and more obscure artists on their roster, I was going to say they are almost a mid career XL but just checked and they were founded in 1994.
Also, if your part of beggars banquet how independent are you? And what were the circumstances around them joining?
My first job in a&r (at Nonesuch, from 2008-2011) was special. I scouted artists based upon my ears. My job was to find something I had never heard before, decide if we could define an audience for it, and rely on a press ecosystem to let potential fans discover it. There were a few fleeting reasons why this approach could work: There wasn't as much music being put out then. It was conceivable I could listen to virtually everything in the western world and have a frame of reference of what I was hearing - then pick out what was truly special. There was also a vibrant press community with a proactively engaged audience. If something had a favorable review in a few key places, I knew it was worth X revenue for the label.
My second job in a&r (head of a&r for Sony Masterworks from 2017 -2023) was not great. It was a data analytics job. Using all the streaming & social data we could find, we would look for evidence a song or artist was garnering attention. In fact, I often knew quite a bit about an artist, and what a potential fan base looked like, before I heard a note. It was also impossible to understand where it fit into the cultural context with the sheer volume of music being released: In between these two a&r jobs I was director of artist partnerships & industry relations for Pandora. We had the history of western recorded music in our catalog - about 18M tracks by 2014. According to Audible Magic, that number is now 220M tracks. A growth of a factor of ten in ten years.
I spend a lot of time thinking about recreating my Nonesuch days, and if it's even possible. I really don't know. The correlation between musical/ songwriting talent and having a career, while already tenuous in my Nonesuch days, is gone. The skill set(s) a musician needs to reach an audience are increasingly non-creative. I don't think it's impossible for the next Radiohead to have a big career based on their musical quality, but I do think it might be impossible for a single label to have enough of these that it's a business.